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Bolivia: When minorities deny the rights of the majorities

By
Miguel Lora Fuentes, Bolpress (translation by David Montoute)

How
true it is that nothing lasts forever. Bolivia’s exploited classes, of
mainly indigenous origin, are now confronting more than five centuries of
exclusion. This territory’s original inhabitants were subjugated by the cross
and the sword during the colonial period, they were harassed and had their
lands taken from them under the Republic, and their culture was ignored during
the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1952. Now, as they finally take state
power by democratic means at the beginning of the 21st century, the dominant
minority accuses them of wanting to install the ``first racist, fascist state
in Latin America’’.

The current historical juncture is characterised by a profound crisis of the market economy, of liberal democracy and of the very foundations of the old republican colonial state, a monocultural, centralist and exclusionary state that has remained intact since the foundation of the Republic.

The
current historical moment opened by the indigenous and working-class movements resembles
the period between the 1940s and 1950s in which a struggle for power between
the ``rosca’’ [oligarchy] and the popular movement marked the prelude to the
nationalist revolution of 1952.

What
is new is that the indigenous peoples are now the challengers of the old
colonial state –which was both subordinated to foreign powers and the architect
of today’s racialised class-society. Determined to liberate themselves from
their accursed colonial heritage, the historically excluded sectors, who were
never recognised as subjects with political rights, are changing the course of
the state and attempting to consolidate cultural, socioeconomic and institutional
reforms in the country.

The
exercise of politics has been ``deprivatised’’. Previously it was in the hands
of the systemic parties, whereas now the masses have burst onto the scene,
appropriating the bourgeois democracy and the normative judicial apparatus
which has historically subordinated them. Vice-President Alvaro García Linera
defines this juncture in ``Leninist’’ terms: ``It is the moment of the masses …
Bolivia’s Indians have decided
to become political actors and decision makers. This is the most important
event in the history of the Republic and has delivered a mortal blow to the
neo-liberal model.’’

In the minds of the exploited classes, a different vision of
the state has crystallised, and a SecondRepublic is
emerging, one whose sustenance is the communitarian civilisation ignored from
the Republic’s inception.

From
the beginning of this century a ``new plural and social subject’’ is under
construction, and it demands a new national project. It has broken with the
old, colonial, republican state and assumed the historical challenge of
collectively building the new SocialUnitarianState based on plurinational
communitarian law. Its aim is a true Bolivia – one that is
democratic, productive, peaceful and committed to integral development and the
free will of the people.

Without
moving an inch beyond the conservative boundaries of the exhausted neoliberal
paradigm, the most reactionary political and business interests have rejected
the democratic battle of ideas and called for fascist tactics to block the
transformations promoted by the immense majorities.

Minorities
entrenched in the region of the ``half moon’’, deceived by the agro-industrial,
land-owning commercial elite and linked to multinationals, openly violate the
democratic rules of the game. They denigrate institutional rule, practice the
crime of sedition, openly call for disobedience and organise de facto
mini-republics that are independent of central authority.

In
search of pluralism

The
right wing understands the background of the current program of transformation
as the ``domination of one group by another’’. It sees the ``closing-down’’ of
political, economic and cultural freedoms, the construction of a ``racist state’’
with the ``constitutionalisation’’ of the term ``native indigenous campesinos’’
. According to the Podemos parliamentarian Walter Javier Arrázola Mendivil,
this term has no sociological or historical foundation and shatters the
universal principle of ``citizenship’’.

The
conservative political sectors see only the descendents of the pre-conquest
peoples and nations being recognised by the new political constitution of the state,
while other social identities built in the last 500 years, such as the mestizos
[mixed Spanish/indigenous heritage] are denied any value.

The
right says that the new Magna Carta ``creates first and second-class citizens’’
and ignores ``mestizaje’’ [the ``mixed race’’]. In this way, ``being
indigenous’’ becomes a means of social and economic advancement and a kind of
``cultural and economic [reprisal]’.

But
is this really the case?

The
prelude to the Magna Carta approved at the end of 2007 describes the existence
of a wide diversity of cultures in our national territory. These cultures had
no experience of racism until the advent of colonial rule.

Now,
the Bolivian people propose the building of a new, truly pluralist state,
inspired by the memory of its martyrs and its past social and indigenous
struggles. The indigenous worker-campesino majorities are carrying out a
bourgeois democratic revolution. They don’t seek to wipe out the conservative
political minorities, but rather demand respect and equality for all.

The
only goal of the indigenous emergence, says García Linera, is equality – nothing
more, nothing less. That is why its premise is the construction of a state that
is respectful of political, economic, juridical, cultural and linguistic
pluralism. Above all, it must promote the ``intercivilisational complementarity
of the Bolivian people in all their diversity’’, living together, and with
universal access to water, work, education, health and housing.

However,
the new political constitution of the state seeks to establish the foundations
of a new ``pluralistic society’’ from the political, economic, judicial and
cultural perspective, and transcend the postulates of economic liberalism and
representative democracy.

To
this end, the indigenous worldview for the first time ever becomes a substantial
part of the plurinational state’s identity. Now, communitarian institutions are
recognised as an inherent part of the state’s forms of economic, political and
cultural organisation.[1]

For
the conservative right-wing, the constitution’s recognition of the pre-colonial
indigenous nations and peoples is excessive. It considers this recognition a
disproportionate benefit from the plurinational state, as with the
institutional representation of the state or the autonomous indigenous territories
and their sovereign control of renewable and non-renewable resources.

It
is inconceivable for them that the native, indigenous campesinos should have direct
representation with their ``practices and customs’’, 50% representation in
Congress and other state organisms/institutions such as the Constitutional
Tribunal, the Agro-ecological Tribunal and the Plurinational Electoral Council.
But the only thing the constitution really does is recognise the free will and
self-determination of these peoples, in accordance with Agreement 169 of the International
Labour Organisation (ILO) and the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples ratified by
the majority of the world’s countries on the September 13, 2007.[2]

`Mestizos’ vs. indigenous peoples

The
Right minimises the importance of indigenous demographics in Bolivia and sticks closely to
the concept of ``mestizo multiculturality’’ to devalue the communitarian
orientation of the current changes. ``The statistical mean in each
indigenous group or ethnicity (37 in total) is a little over a thousand
inhabitants, which the political and ideological project of the MAS [Movement
Towards Socialism] attempts to configure as a nation.’’

According
to parliamentary representative Arrázola, there are only two numerous
indigenous groups in Bolivia: the Aymara and the
Quechua (91% of the indigenous population) who inhabit the departments of La Paz, Oruro, Potosí, Chuquisaca and Cochabamba, the western half of the
country. The other 9% is made up of almost 500,000 natives distributed among 34
lowland ethnicities (Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz and Tarija). The
opposition legislator claims that there is no ``credible data’’ that shows a
native and indigenous majority in Bolivia, the only document that
backs this claim is the ``Censo de Población y Vivienda’’ carried out in 2001,
which concludes that 62% of Bolivians identify themselves as indigenous. This
study, adds Arrázola, did not offer Bolivians the choice of identifying
themselves as mestizos, unlike a study five years earlier (``Auditoría de la
Democracia, Informe Boliviano 2006’’), which arrived at the conclusion that 64%
of Bolivians describe themselves as mestizo or cholo; 19% indigenous or native;
11% white; 0.55% black and 4.28% ``none of the above’’. ``Genetically’’ it’s
impossible to demonstrate racial or ethnic purity, since globalisation has
created a hybrid world. Even the President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia is a ``mestizo or
cholo’’ because his surname is of Spanish origin, whilst Ayma is of indigenous
origin, says Arrázola.

What
is certain is that the national majority identifies with one or another of the
country’s 37 ethnic groups, some of which extend beyond national boundaries. To
the 1.3 million Aymaras who inhabit La Paz, Oruro, Potosí and Cochabamba, we must consider the
100,000 Aymaras in Chile concentrated in Tarapacá
and Antofagasta, with another 600,000 in Peru, mostly in Puno, Arequipa, Moquegua and Tacna. In Peru alone, the Aymara occupy
a territory approximately the size of Belgium or Switzerland in seven of the Puno
department’s ten provinces. Besides this, the Guarani are almost 300,000 in Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil.

A `Marxist-Stalinist’ state?

The
conservative political sectors see the MAS program’s use of the term ``indigenous’’
as an ideological prop of a ``Marxist-Stalinist’’ state – one that substitutes
ethnic struggles for the class struggle. While the official constitution
guarantees the protection of private property, the centralised ``state
capitalism’’ of a planned economy will, in their opinion, lead to a gradual
elimination of private property.

The
fact is that Morales’ government negotiated new contracts with the oil
companies which guaranteed their holdings, their investments and their profits.
It provided strong guarantees for private property and investment in accordance
with the law, while the new constitution essentially proposes that the old
elites share power with the emerging indigenous elites.

The
economy envisioned by the new pluralist state expressly states that the
communitarian, state, private and social-cooperative forms of economic organisation
``are equal before the law’’ and are articulated on the principles of complementarity,
reciprocity, solidarity, redistribution, equality, sustainability, balance,
justice and transparency.

The
four axes of the new pluricultural state under construction are:

1.
The state as protagonist in the economy and responsible for the equitable redistribution
of the national wealth;

2.
Equality between Bolivia’s diverse peoples and
cultures;

3.
The right of the indigenous peoples to take decisions at a state level; and

4.
The autonomous national state.

One
of the objectives of the changes is the reconstitution of the indigenous
communities –facilitating the autonomous development of their collective
culture. Its starting point is an acknowledgement of the current unequal land
distribution. The west covers a third of the national territory and is home to
almost two-thirds of the population, while the east, which covers two-thirds of
the country, is home to little more than a third of the population.

The
right claims that the MAS will take advantage of the native, campesino
concept to redistribute eastern territories. In this way, the inhabitants of
the west can ``conquer’’, ``neo-colonise’’ and promote a process of ``acculturisation’’
of the lowland inhabitants who historically, culturally and sociologically
built ``mestizo identities’’.

A single national project and regionalresistance

The
conservative political sectors define the current juncture as a struggle
between two distinct visions of two distinct and different countries. But in practice,
the minority provincial classes lack a concrete program, as in 1952, and are
simply opposing the new political and economic project that is dominated by the
national majorities.

Small
clans permanently linked to political power, and co-governing with the military
dictatorships and neoliberal regimes, were cornered by a popular insurrection
in 2003. After 20 years of ``democracy’’, this is the first government in which
these groups are not directly administering the state apparatus.

The
land has become a strong and cohesive rallying point for the national
oligarchy. A report by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reveals
that approximately 100 feudal-style families own five times more land (25
million hectares) than 2 million campesinos (five million hectares) condemned
to scratching a living from eroded and over-exploited mini-estates. On average,
a landowning family in Bolivia holds a quarter of a
million hectares, while a campesino family must make do with one hectare.

The
concentration of land is most notorious in the department of Santa Cruz. There the latifundios
[large estates] were initially set up with the help of ex-dictators and later
by corrupt functionaries and politicians of the old, defunct political parties
such as the ADN, MIR and MNR after the ``second agrarian reform’’ of 1996.[3]

The
clan is powerful because in addition to land, it also owns rivers, forests,
haciendas and even the very lives of its labourers. It controls the agro-industrial
sector, foreign trade, the banks and the communications media of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija. It
controls the principal business, civil and even popular organisations. And now
the oligarchy has de facto control of the government and political power in Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija – that
is, in four of the country’s nine departments.

Seeing
their interests threatened by a new constitution that restricts individual landholdings
to a maximum of 5000 to 10,000 hectares, the ruling classes openly conspire
against the government and try to set up autonomous mini-republics. These have
their own parliament and police forces, and total control over land, taxes and
the region’s natural resources.

The
conservative minorities recovered their influence by championing autonomy and
fighting centralism, which according to them is responsible for all the
nation’s ills. ``Bolivian and indigenous poverty, above all in the west of the
country, is a result of state centralism and the concentration of decision making
in the government of La Paz... Faced with the
country’s poverty, the eastern departments proposed decentralisation and
democratisation of power, by means of the Departmental Autonomies’’, says
Arrázola, arguing that the rich Cruceño region (where two-thirds of the
nation’s GDP is generated; Santa Cruz produces one-third of GDP, 50% of taxes
and import duties and slightly more than half of Bolivia’s food) grew ``thanks
to hard work, and the liberal and enterprising vision of its people’’.

Businesspeople,
traditional party politicians and various middle-class professionals make up a
solid anti-popular bloc capable of mobilising great numbers of people. They
have the firm support of the pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee and the bourgeoisie
as a whole: the Eastern Chamber of Forests and Fisheries (CAO), the Santa Cruz
Chamber of Industry, Trade, Services and Tourism (Cainco), the Businessmen’s
Federation and the Santa Cruz Cattle Ranching Federation (Fegasacruz).

The
circumstantial leader of the clan is Branco Marinkovic, president of the Santa
Cruz Civic Committee, who together with Governor Costas, is the visible leader
of the secessionist movement. On December 6, 2007, Marinkovic sent a letter to
President Morales to inform him that he was taking up a struggle ``for
democracy and freedom against dictatorship’’, stating that Santa Cruz autonomy move
has no political motives and no individual’s personal interests behind it. This
is despite the fact that he could be the principal estate-holder to suffer from
the Agrarian Reform’s Communitarian Recovery Law.[4]

The
US embassy promotes and
finances the clan. Philip Goldberg has a close relationship with Costas and
Marinkovic, whilst USAID finances rightist politicians. Goldberg also worked as
special assistant to US ambassador Richard
Holbrooke between 1994 and 1996. Holbrooke was one of the architects of Yugoslavia’s disintegration and the
downfall of President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Goldberg, who promoted the
separation of Serbia and Montenegro, was also in Kosovo,
fomenting conflict between Serbs and Albano-Kosovars. Now he encourages the
rebellion of the Bolivian autonomists.

The
rebellion of big business in the four departments has made it clear that
Bolivian society has yet to overcome the defects of the past. In recent months,
peasants and indigenous people have been denigrated, insulted, spat at and
beaten on the streets of Santa Cruz and Sucre for the sole reason of
having darker skin and wearing pleated pollera skirts and abarca
sandals.

It’s
as if we had regressed decades in a matter of months. All of a sudden, small
white and mestizo groups are reincorporating discriminatory and racist
expressions into their vocabulary, things we believed dead and buried. In Sucre and Santa Cruz, there is daily
denigration of the ``smelly and uncultured Indians’’, the ``fucking Indians’’,
the ``dirty collas’’ and ``uppity Indians’’. Today, the oligarchy defies the
legitimate president merely because he is an ``Indian’’, a ``macaque’’, an
``ignoramus’’…

The clans' political hegemony is broken

The
political crisis generated by society’s most conservative sectors has
apparently stalled the country’s transformation, but it has simultaneously
radicalised the position of the popular movements. On September 10, 2007, a ``Conference of Campesinos,
Native Peoples and Popular Urban Organisations’’ ratified an urgent policy
requirement. Namely, ``expropriation of the latifundios without compensation
and the immediate distribution of their lands among rural and urban producers
who are prepared to make use of it for the benefit of society’’.

President
Morales’ priority in his third year of governance is to accelerate the program
of structural transformation and the ``decolonisation’’ of the state with the
help of a new National Coordinating Committee for Change. One of its first
measures is the recovery and expropriation the holdings of landowners enslaving
the Chaco’s indigenous people.[5]

The
process of decolonisation is irreversible. This is not a political speech, but
a painful reality which must be approached with boldness. And, as Morales says,
the only way to transform the state is to close the deep wound which
colonialism left in Latin America.

The
government says it has fulfilled the basic program of the 2005 electoral
campaign, such as the nationalisation of oil and gas, and the establishment of
a constituent assembly. It now tries to incorporate the philosophical
principles of the indigenous community into the new state, meaning the equal
redistribution of natural wealth and resources, and a collective ``living
standard’’ that does not depend upon anyone’s exploitation.

The
aim of the plurinational state under construction is the search for a decent
standard of living – one with sovereignty, dignity, complementarity,
solidarity, harmony and equality in the distribution and redistribution of the
social product. The new Magna Carta questions neoliberalism from a
communitarian perspective, privileging equality over freedom and collective
rights over individual rights.

According
to many analysts, Bolivia is experiencing a break
with the philosophical principles of the ``Enlightenment’’ – that is, a break
with the idea of the individual as nature’s supposed owner and master. In the
indigenous project, not only individual and social rights are claimed, but also
those of nature itself.

The
Bolivian state has recognised indigenous societies as alternative societal
models, distinct from capitalism, the market and Western society. On the
international scene it holds up this other kind of conviviality, superior to
the Western individualism that has unleashed the environmental crisis.

The
Bolivian social movements are building a more civilised human model, austere
and respectful of nature, with the invaluable contribution of the ancestral
knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples. They are creating a collective
subject that does not jettison individual creativity and private freedoms, but
does privilege the individual’s intersubjective dimension and his essentially
communal identity.

Notes

[1]
``SECTION III: CULTURES. Article 99: I. Cultural diversity is
the essential foundation of the PlurinationalCommunitarianState. Interculturality is the
instrument of cohesion and harmonious and balanced conviviality amongst all
peoples and nations. Interculturality will respect differences within equal
conditions. II. The State assumes the existence of native indigenous campesino
cultures as reservoirs of values, knowledge, spirituality and visions as a firm
resolution. III. It will be the State’s fundamental responsibility to preserve,
develop, protect and promote the nation’s cultures.’’

[2]
After 24 years of debate, the United Nations approved the Declaration on the
Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, which recognised the right to
self-determination, possession of land, access to natural resources and the
preservation of the traditional knowledge and culture of the world’s 370
million indigenous people. As victims of historic injustice, the colonisation
and usurpation of their lands, territories and resources has prevented them
from exercising their right to development in accordance with their own needs
and interests. Now these indigenous peoples are free from discrimination,
according to the preamble of the historic declaration. The declaration also
condemns doctrines, policies and practices based on the superiority of
particular peoples or persons for any national, racial, religious, ethnic or
cultural reasons. These are, it says, ``racist, scientifically false, judicially
invalid, morally abhorrent and socially unjust’’. Bolivia has become the first
country in the world to pass into national law this historic declaration of the
United Nations. ``Bolivia is a nation of nations’’,
said Evo Morales as he declared Law 3760 on the rights of the indigenous peoples.

[3]
Three years ago, the INRA estimated that the Cruceño provinces of Guarayos,
Chiquitos and Cordillera had 800,000 hectares of recoverable land in the hands
of 500 individuals. No small number of former ministers and legislators abused
their power to monopolise land. Former Senate president Sandro Giordano and his
wife, and the family of Luis Fernando Saavedra Bruno, are notable
examples.

[4]
Notables in the right-wing power bloc are Oscar Ortiz, former manager of Cainco
and now a senator for Podemos, the offshoot of the fascist ADN of ex-dictator
Hugo Banzer; ex-president of Fegasacruz Antonio Franco (a rancher and current
Podemos legislator who demanded the jailing of NGOs that help indigenous
people); and Branco Marinkovic, ex-president of the Businessmen’s Federation
and now president of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee. In the civil section of
the autonomist front, the former president of the Civic Committee Rubén Costas
stands out. Today he is the department’s governor. The former parliamentarian
and health minister Carlos Dabdoub is one of the movement’s ideologues and
currently the autonomy secretary for the Santa Cruz governorship. According
to INRA, 15 families have half a million hectares of land which is an area 25
times bigger than the city of Santa Cruz (20,000 hectares). (See
``The rebellion of the 100 clans’’, www.econoticiasbolivia.com;
``The land question – the background to the autonomy movement’’, www.bolpress.com).

[5]
There are still about a thousand landless Guarani families, with neither a
salary nor basic rights. As unbelievable as it sounds, the boss’ permission is
required to even speak to them.